CVG has a nice preview of Deep Shadows’s upcoming title; White Gold. Here’s a snippet:

With White Gold’s play area consisting of six large islands and 50 smaller ones dotted about them, you might think that you’ve seen similar free-roaming fare with games like Just Cause.

What sets White Gold apart though, is its grounding in roleplay. You may well be able to drive tanks and nip around on quad bikes, but this Caribbean jet setting will be complemented by an inventory system straight out of Deus Ex and a full set of roleplay perks and experience. 

Full preview here.

The crazy brits at bit-tech.net got to play around with VALVe’s upcoming Zombie co-op title; Left 4 Dead. Here’s a snippet:

There’s a whole lot more depth to Left4Dead than we’ve let on yet though, like the fact that characters will automatically shout things at each other if the AI director deems that players need to communicate but can’t – it’s very handy to have the guy covering you automatically yell that he’s out of ammo when the two of you are trying your best to hold a front line.

Check out the full preview here.

CVG has a hands-on preview of THQ’s upcoming title Red Faction: Guerrilla. Red Faction: Guerrilla will be the third game in the Red Faction franchise and is set 50 years after Red Faction 2. Unlike the predessors, Red Faction: Guerrilla is no longer an FPS, instead, the game has become a free-roaming third-person-shooter. Here’s a bit from the preview:

 It’s almost like a modern take on the Wild West - humans are establishing settlements and frontier towns in an attempt to colonise the planet. Naturally - since the human race can’t agree on anything without getting into a fight - war breaks out and you, Alec Mason, the man in the fluorescent builder’s jacket, find yourself in the middle of an all-out extra-terrestrial war zone. Which is the perfect excuse to stomp all over the EDF’s buildings, vehicles and soldiers in giant robots and smash them with massive hammers.

French gaming magazine Joypad has a preview of the upcoming Prince of Persia title. Eurogamer.net has roughly translated the preview into english. Here’s a snip:

Creative director Jean-Christophe Guyot told Joypad that the aim was to create a more fantastical game and “more poetic vision” than the Sands of Time trilogy, with which it shares no connection. “The previous trilogy mixed the Arabian Nights in with historical Persia,” he said (in French, so please excuse our rough translation). “We decided we’d prefer to return to the tales of the Thousand and One Nights for something more colourful.

Valve has patched up the recently updated version of Team Fortress 2. This update fixes the get all achievements console command which unlocked all unlocks/achievements for medic.

Updates to Team Fortress 2 have been released. The updates will be applied automatically when your Steam client is restarted. The specific changes include:

Team Fortress 2 Client

• Removed TF2 achievement console commands

Team Fortress 2 Server

• Fixed clients being able to trigger sv_soundscape_printdebuginfo on the server
• Fixed potential “nuke” exploit in rcon subsystem

Speaking with CVG, Mike Gallo, Producer of Aliens: Colonial Marines has revealed some slimy details about this upcoming profanity-filled-face-raping-game-to-movie-adoption FPS:

CVG: What elements of the movies are you most hoping to recreate?

Gallo: Since Aliens is our closest influence, we have strived for authenticity to the film that players have never seen before. The look of the game is directly inspired by the film, down to the film grain and lighting. We’ve hired Syd Mead to go back and create new concepts based on artwork that he made over 20 years ago.

CVG got to chat with Sony Entertainment Online’s Kevin O’Hara about their upcoming MMO The Agency. Here’s a snippet:

“We’ll also have PvP maps where you can choose either side of the battle regardless of your agency,” continues O’Hara. “But if you don’t like PvP, don’t worry, you won’t ever have to do it, but hopefully it should be easy enough that everybody tries it out to see it isn’t as punishing as many MMOs.”

Check out the full preview here. The Agency will be landing on PC and PlayStation3, the release date is classified for the moment.

CVG has some juicy new details about the upcoming first person shooter Aliens: Colonial Marines. Here’s a snip:

All the Colonial Marines’ armoury seen in Aliens will appear in the game, including the pulse rifle, those cool automated gun turrets that appear in the extended Aliens: Special Edition, and Hicks’ favourite boom stick, the Remington shotgun - although to keep you immersed in the action, there’s no in-game HUD, with ammo counters appearing on the side of each weapon.

Get your face raped here!

A belgian magazine,PCGameplay has details of Relic’s upcoming RTS, Dawn of War 2! Dawn of War 2 has been in development since September 2006 and is scheduled for a 2009 release. Here’s a snip from the magazine:

- Uses the Essence 2.0 engine with Havok physics, all optimised for DX10 and multicore support.
- It looks great, think of the DoW intro but with a bit less polygons here and there (in terms of lighting and all that it looks almost exactly the same).
- Units also use CoH-like unit AI for awareness and pathfinding to find cover and such.
- [b]While DoW 2 shares the same (upgraded probably) engine as CoH[ it won’t be “CoH in space”,/B] while soldiers in CoH will ask themselves if flanking the enemy is the right option, in DoW2 it will be more like Space Marines asking themselves if they should use their jetpacks to jump over an Ork squad to attack them in the back. Different settings, different kinds of warfare.
- Preview only showed a destroyed city landscape, akin to DoW (but more detailed), other tilesets will offer deserts, jungles, mountains and other cities.
- Only the Orkz and Space Marines were revealed, more races on the way obviously and to be to revealed later this year (though how many isn’t known).
- Co-op campaign for both the Orkz and Space Marines, apparently not for the other to-be-revealed races.
- More focus on making units and squads unique; every unit has got a name (at least in the campaign it seems), more details and more animations.
- Relic wants to give players rewards at the end of a mission like wargear (armor, weapons, rare objects); “Let’s pimp out squads with cool stuff!”, you will see these items in-game as well of course.
- You’ll fight your way through the campaign with the same squads.
- You can’t control more than six squads! I am not sure if this is campaign-only but the preview made it sound like it wasn’t.
- The squads are going to be a lot more interesting than before though.
- A squad leader (one or several?) will need to survive if you want to complete a mission; you really have to look out for your squads and don’t treat them like cannon fodder.
- There is a lot more interesting commentary from the units as well; if your SM commander is holding a Thunder Hammer f.e. then the opponent will specifically comment on that, Ork Warchief saying something like “Ooh, nice hammer, but mine is bigger!”. The warchief will say something else if the commander doesn’t have the hammer.
- The campaign lets Space Marines operate from a spaceship, you’ll get a view of an underlying planet and you’ll be able to choose from different missions (which are tagged with difficulty colours, green, blue and red).
- Certain reward items won’t be useable at once in the campaign, so they’ll be taken back to the SM spaceship for research.
- Dreadnought can now also trample Orkz.
- No sea or air units (though jetpacks are still in of course).
- Development team of 55 people has been working on it since September 2006.
- Release in early 2009 or later.

2 pieces of exclusive artwork after the break! Read the rest of this entry »

CVG has a preview of EA’s upcoming multiplayer first person shooter, Battlefield: Heroes. The Team Fortress 2 inspired (or rip-off, if you will) FREE multiplayer first person shooter promises to be playable on any system and also claims to be the “deepest” Battlefield game released yet. Check it out here